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A. Scope and Background

1) Organization and Data under scope

IT service data is confidential in the organizations because it is critical to Service Level Agreements
(SLA) between organizations. Thereby in the absence of an organization ready to share such data, I
have created my own data and various organization scenarios for the purpose of this project.

2) IT Service Management (ITSM)

Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) is a general terminology used to describe the
planning, delivering, managing and improving the IT services to the businesses. It covers end to end
activities and IT processes which support the business areas. Key management areas are change
management, service management, release management, knowledge management, asset management,
problem and incident management. [1]

3) IT Tickets

‘Information Technology (IT) Tickets’ is refers to a record of work performed (or to be performed) by
an IT support team to maintain the organization’s IT environment, resolving issues, complete user
requests, and enhance the IT system. Depending on kind or IT environment, the tickets may denote
different types of activities and the support priorities. The term may change accordingly like ‘change
ticket’, ‘incident ticket’, ‘release ticket’ or ‘service ticket’ etc. IT Ticket is the most generalized form
used across the industry for the purpose of simplicity of its meaning to end users, business and IT staff.

4) Present Scenarios of Various Technologies & Methodologies for ITSM

a) Importance of IT Tickets

IT tickets are logs of all past, present and known upcoming activities to maintain & improve the IT
environment to keep generating business value. ITSM system keeps details of all IT tickets. Various
persons (like end users, support help desk, support teams etc.) create, update and manage the ticket
throughout its lifecycle. Latest IT ticket data communicates the status of the activities. Tickets also
include communication history, comments and interaction details between support teams and requester
(generally end user). The operations team (support team) sees the IT tickets as a task list for them to
complete under predefined time limits. The IT service manager uses the ticket data to understand the
quality of support and uses this data to improve the support quality if needed. During escalations (where
support quality isn’t found up to the mark) the IT ticket acts as a reference to the particular support that
needs to be escalated.